Ripping the Republican Big Tent Apart

by Christopher ChantrillDecember 18, 2007 at 6:39 am

FIFTY YEARS ago the US conservative movement began in a fusion between Burkean conservatives and libertarian conservatives. In the late Sixties they were joined by the “mugged by reality” neoconservatives.

Then in the 1970s the Supreme Court created the Christian Right with Roe v. Wade and added social conservatives to the movement.

These different factions in the conservative movement have not always got along, but they have learned to live with each other and to respect each others agenda. The poster boy for this is Rush Limbaugh. Divorced several times, he is a success-oriented conservative; yet he is respectful towards social conservatives and he is pro-life.

Having learned to live with each over the years many of us were shocked when John McCain ran for president against the social conservatives in 2000. Why would anyone want to do that, we wondered? Its become clear, in the years since, that McCain is a national security conservative only, and just doesnt understand, and doesnt want to understand the other factions of the movement.

The initial first tier candidates for 2008Giuliani, Romney, Thompsonare all fusion candidates. They may target their appeal to one faction or another, but they do not try to split the conservative movement.

But insurgents like Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee are splitters. Ron Paul is trying to create a divide between libertarians and the rest of the conservative movement and Mike Huckabee is trying to create a divide between evangelical conservatives and the rest of the conservative movement. And then there is John McCain, who still wants to split off national security conservatives from the rest of the movement.

Im rooting for one of the uniters to win. And I hope that all of the dividers fail. Our conservative movement needs to grow. It needs to be ready and welcoming when the next troop of Americans is cast out into the political wilderness by the liberal establishment.

The various wings of the movement have broadly similar goals and the particular concerns of each faction informs and inspires the others.

Comments:

I agree, a divided conservative movement can't win in this media climate. Ron Paul has a lot of good things to say but he will never have the party behind him and neither will McCain. Huckabee, I beg you, please go away! What we don't need is a minister right now, we need a manager. The rest of the Republican hopefuls are imperfect but are all miles ahead of any Dem...

Very good analysis of the candidates.
Ron Paul can be a particular danger to the Republicans this year. He has raised a decent amount of money and has gotten good exposure in the debates, etc., both of which he can use to great effect in a third party run after he is defeated in the primaries. After all, Paul did run for the presidency as a libertarian in 1988 -- what's to say he won't do it again. If he does, he'll probably get 5 to 7% of the vote, enough to ensure a Dem victory.

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

Civil Societya complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churchesbuilds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.Francis Fukuyama, Trust

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense. Lord Salisbury, Letter to Lord Lytton

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel